The Mummy Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (23 page)

O’Connell said, “Oh, hell,” as he saw the Emperor with his arm drawn back to throw the dagger.

The adventurer flew past the astrolabe to dive under the blade as it sailed in his direction but the Emperor had anticipated this, and the blade landed close to O’Connell’s head, barely missing, the blade snapping near the hilt and clattering to the stone floor.

O’Connell got to his feet and stepped out into the open and faced the small yet commanding figure in ancient black armor. For a man several thousand years old, the Emperor had a boyish countenance, but for the eyes of ageless evil.

“No more tricks,” O’Connell said, fueled by a father’s rage. “Fight like a man!”

The language barrier did not prevent the Emperor from understanding this challenge.

And Er Shi Huangdi was nothing if not proud. There would be no shape-shifting, no use of his mastery over the elements—a man from two centuries before the birth of Christ would meet another from the twentieth century
A.D.
, in hand-to-hand, warrior-to-warrior combat.

They charged at each other.

Meeting halfway down the path to the altar stairs, the opponents brought wildly differing styles to the fight—the skillful, even balletic martial arts of the Emperor against the hard-earned if utilitarian technique of the soldier of fortune.

At first O’Connell’s size advantage seemed to hold sway, but soon Er Shi Huangdi’s lightning-fast skills overcame that advantage, and the first hard wave of punishment was taken by O’Connell.

In the waterwheel’s machinery room, Evy was similarly taking a beating, tumbling down the steps and smacking against a giant cog. Choi dove on top of Evy and began to choke her.

Lin, engaged in her own martial-arts duel with Yang, saw Evy’s predicament but could not tear away, the general’s blistering assault demanding all of her attention.

Fighting for breath, Evy reached behind her, latched on to a moving cog and was lifted along with her opponent. As they rose, Choi’s grip was threatened, then finally the colonel had to let loose, and dropped as Evy continued to be lifted by the massive machinery.

And when Choi hit the floor, Lin was able to spare a hooking kick that caught the colonel in the face, perhaps providing the makings of another scar. Evy watched, relieved, as Choi fell to the floor, down for the count.

Then she dropped to the stone floor to join Lin against General Yang.

In the Foundation Chamber, Alex came around to see his father in the midst of mano a mano with the Emperor. Why Er Shi Huangdi was not resorting to magic was beyond Alex, but his father seemed to be doing all right, in a brutal match between kung fu blows and hard-knuckled brawling.

As he pushed himself up, Alex noticed his own blood trailing down into the wide gutter fed by the underground stream under the floor; trenches of water passed on either side of the fire-lighted pathway to the altar, flowing on by, possibly coming up around behind the altar.

A tiny smile formed at the same time as a big idea . . .

O’Connell had gained the upper hand, and now had his hands around the Emperor’s throat while kneeing the bastard in the chest, again and again, with a viciousness born from the assumption his son had not survived.

Overpowered, the Emperor changed the rules—and himself back into terra-cotta. Immediately, O’Connell’s repeated blows served to pulverize the hard clay. Finally he hurled the terra-cotta torso into the astrolabe, and the Emperor smashed into thousands of shards.

O’Connell, breathing hard, bleeding here and there, stumbled toward the waterwheel, and the corner where he’d left Alex. He was not aware that, behind him, those clay shards were reassembling and turning to flesh . . .

But when O’Connell reached the corner where Alex had lain, the boy was gone.

“Alex!” he called.

And then the father noticed something: at his feet was the broken hilt of the dragon dagger and something else—a “plus” sign, written in blood . . .

Divide,
he thought,
and conquer.

As he turned, O’Connell saw Alex, in a dead man’s float, in the water gutter heading for the altar. And he understood what his son had in mind. This realization came to him just half a second before a big fireball was flung at him.

The ball of flame knocked him off his feet and propelled him over the astrolabe, setting him ablaze.

Nonchalantly, O’Connell’s screams meaning nothing to him, Er Shi Huangdi turned and headed down the pathway to the stairs and the altar, where he would finish what he’d begun, and reclaim the souls of those sorry slaves who’d rebelled against him today.

In the cog room, General Yang suddenly leaped away from the two women; it seemed at first a strange capitulation, but Evy realized the man had spotted her fallen revolver, down underneath the cogs.

She ran to stop him, but in one swift move, Yang caught her legs in his own scissored ones, and sent her crashing down, hard. Then he jammed the fallen Evy in the neck, with his boot heel, while retrieving the lost revolver by kicking it with his other foot, up near his grasp.

Lin moved quickly in, just in time for Yang to sweep the pistol snout in her face.

Yang said, “So—you would prefer to die first?”

But it was Evy who responded, “After
you . . .”

And she straight-legged her foot into his groin with an impact that created instant agony, distracting him while Lin kicked the gun from his fingers, the weapon going off harmlessly.

Evy, now able to slip from Yang’s grip, got to her feet to join Lin in simultaneous kicks to the general’s chest that sent him tumbling back against the grinding cogs.

His jacket caught in their gears, and then dragged him along for the ride into its giant, gnashing teeth.

Choi was rising from the floor to stare in horror as Yang futilely tried to pull himself free.

In Mandarin, the lovely scarred colonel cried out,
“No, my love! No . . .”

And Evy and Lin became spectators, watching Choi race to Yang’s aid. Neither had guessed that the general and the colonel were an item, but indeed they were, as was evident by what followed.

Choi grabbed Yang’s arm and tried to wrench him free, coming dangerously close to the giant gears herself.

He protested:
“Let go!”

But she responded with,
“Never!”

And an instant later he was sucked deep into the mechanism, in a horrible symphony of crunch and splash. Still holding on to her lover’s hand, Choi gave the other two women a brief, serene smile before she herself was similarly sucked into those crushing cogs.

Evy and Lin stood in silence, the bizarre sacrifice somehow a moving one to both women.

“I would do the same for Rick,” Evy admitted.

“And I,” Lin said, “for your son.”

In the midst of the struggle, and the horror, the two women had reached a new understanding.

The Emperor stood at the foot of the altar, preparing to take up where he’d been interrupted. He did not expect to be interrupted again.

But he was.

Behind him came a voice: “Is that all you got?”

And Er Shi Huangdi wheeled to see a scorched, dripping-wet Rick O’Connell, the hilt of the broken dagger tight in his fist, coming up the last few steps to the altar platform.

On what he knew was a likely suicide mission, O’Connell charged the Emperor, who smiled as he stepped forward to meet this pitiful challenge.

The Emperor, his back to the altar now, could not see Alex O’Connell—hidden on the other side, and also dripping wet—come up and over with the blade grasped in both hands, launching himself, his body like a bow ready to release an arrow.

The
whoosh
of air bid the Emperor turn his head, but too late, Alex slamming the blade into the man’s back, while his father’s momentum drove the hilt against the black breastplate and the blade, like a magnet seeking metal, shot through the even blacker heart.

And when O’Connell pulled the hilt back, he was amazed to see the blade magically reattached.

Agape, stunned in pain and in full realization of his doom, Er Shi Huangdi fell to his knees, as if in prayer, at the feet of Rick O’Connell . . .

. . . who leaned in close to say through lips peeled back over a ghastly grin: “Give my regards to Imhotep.”

Then O’Connell had to step back, because the most amazing transformation of all was beginning. Evy and Lin were below now, having come in from the cog room just in time to share in the fantastic, horrific results of the father and son’s heroism.

Liquid was pouring from the Emperor’s chest wound; not blood, no, but red-hot magma, burning away the battle armor and the flesh beneath it, lava fountaining forth as if all of Er Shi Huangdi’s sins were bubbling out. His heart, withering under the onslaught, was pounding like a battle drum that all in the chamber could hear.

“When Er Shi Huangdi was cursed,” Lin somberly said to Evy, “he burned from the outside in. Now he burns from the inside out.”

And he was: his eyeballs were cooking white, right up to the moment when the magma exploded.

The O’Connell men were already halfway down the steps, but they looked back like Lot’s wife and saw their powerful foe reduced to writhing on the platform, being absorbed into a pool of molten clay.

By the time father and son were at the bottom of that stairway, Er Shi Huangdi was just a smoking indentation on the platform’s floor, vaguely suggesting a once human form.

And on the battlefield, the terra-cotta warriors, who had seemed on the verge of victory against their skeletal foes, began to crack like pots dropped onto tile floors—their weapons, their armor, their steeds, everything crazed with fissures before they toppled to the earth and became just so much more desert dust, if red-tinged . . . leaving the Foundation soldiers to stand in motionless amazement at their unexpected victory.

When the O’Connells and Lin dashed into the daylight, one more amazing sight awaited them in this day of amazing sights: the Foundation soldiers were cheering in elation as the traces of their foes were blown away on the wind.

Then, from their ravaged ranks stepped their general—the great Ming Guo.

Lin stared at the decayed, dignified figure and said, “Father?”

He seemed to smile across the battlefield at her, but father and daughter were not destined to share a moment, because the sky cracked open and a magnificent shaft of bright light shone down. Desiccated flesh and bone disintegrated, and the soldiers who’d fought so bravely this day, the slaves who’d suffered in Er Shi Huangdi’s hellish servitude so long, became motes of dust in the brightest of light.

A cloud passed over and the bright shaft of light was gone and, so, were the brave men that Rick O’Connell had rakishly dubbed “zombie good guys.”

“At last,” Lin said, “they have achieved their goal.”

Alex looked at her. “Their goal?”

She turned to him with moist eyes. “They are free.”

Then, but for a gentle wind, the battlefield fell silent.

 
12
 

The Next Adventure

S
hanghai’s hottest nitery, Imhotep’s, was packed with high-class tourist trade in honor of its new owner, Seamus “Maddog” Maguire, who had also inherited Jonathan Carnahan’s blue brocade tuxedo. The Egyptian trappings remained the same, and the band was, as usual, first-rate, right now going through a medley of Tommy Dorsey tunes. As the proprietor passed along the edge of the dance floor, he noted two couples dancing slow and way off tempo, but all Maddog did was smile. He understood.

These two couples were Rick and Evy O’Connell, and Alex O’Connell and a young woman known only as Lin, a striking lass to Maguire’s eyes, though truth be told he wasn’t sure she was old enough to be served alcoholic beverages, even in a city as freewheeling as Shanghai.

But Maddog was in no mood to cause the O’Connell party trouble; they’d had their share of that lately. Let them celebrate, like he was.

Alex was gazing dreamily into Lin’s dark, lovely, mysterious eyes. “You dance swell for an older woman,” he said.

“You’re all right,” she said, melodically, “for a youngster. Anyway, somebody me told me something once.”